Hilarious animation and illustration from the one and only Jack Cunningham

Remember ages ago we posted an animation of a duck pounding on the chest of a goddess to make her lactate? Well, we did. That was just a taster of the portfolio of Jack Cunningham. With his healthy mix of animation and illustration, both equal in their hilarity and friendly aesthetic, Jack’s creations work magnificently as still images or wiggling ones. On that note, Check out his animation of a kettle boiling, have you ever seen and heard something so satisfying and smooth? I doubt it. Check out his Vimeo page over your lunch as well, there’s a showreel from his University days that is almost too impressive.

Jack Sachs has created an animated film tour of the Tate Britain, where his brilliantly bizarre, plasticine-like CG characters move around the gallery amid the art. Commissioned by Tate Collective for the BP Loud Tate event, a day of performances and workshops, SHHH! sees Jack’s animated creations invade motion-tracked footage of the gallery’s interior space.

Animation collective Late Night Work Club has released, Strangers – a brand new anthology of short films. At 42 minutes long, this is the second project for the collective that rotates its members involvement and it encompasses seven original works created between 2014 and 2016. The roster of animators for this edition includes animations from Nicolas Menard with Wednesday with Goddard, Alex Grigg with Born in a Void and other shorts by Sean Buckelew, Loup Blaster, Caleb Wood, Jeanette Bonds and Kirsten Lepore.

Director Benjamin Portas has created this hypnotic and trippy video for Toronto-based band Fresh Snow and their new track I Can’t Die. The psychedelic animation sees “constructed spaces and realities in digital purgatory”, where floating eyeballs and gloopy, changeable shapes meander a world full of imagery that belongs on forgotten record sleeves of the 1970s.

Illustrator Brian Rea frequently collaborates with Pablo Delcan from Delcan & Co in New York. In the run up to the US Presidential Election, Pablo got in touch with Brian a few days before the big day to create some responsive shorts. “Like everyone else, I was so fucking exhausted from the campaign cycle, but we thought perhaps that’s the thing we could comment on; how much the campaign had impacted us all emotionally, how messages had divided us as a country and how that left us all feeling scared, alone, anxious, angry and embarrassed by what was going down,” explains Brian who also illustrates The New York Times’ regular column Modern Love.

Illustrator Simon Landrein has directed an animated music video for Coco Banana’s track Earthquake. The video, executed in tasteful beige, pink and green-hues, opens following a bored-looking couple in a car. A consciously mundane beginning, the narrative soon escalates into surreal scenes of sex, violence and attempted superheroism, all pulled off with a heavy injection of humour.

Ola Szmida’s animation Unwanted Desires is a compilation of short scenes with one thing in common, “inappropriate behaviour”. Ola has captured the bad thoughts and impulses many of us battle against for fear of being a social outcast. “Such behaviour is inappropriate because of many reasons; sometimes it’s dangerous, disgusting, incomprehensible or just doesn’t comply with social standards,” explains the animator. “Because these actions are ‘forbidden’ it is tempting to cross the border – Unwanted Desires is my personal diary, a notebook of never realised ‘bad impulses’.”